ARCOS Dance – MATTER OF TIME

MATTER OF TIME Project: Potential Future Pasts
‘Potential Future Pasts’ is an interactive performance-installation staged by Austin-based collective ARCOS Dance. A smartphone on a tripod captures a video projection of its own Facebook livestream, creating an audiovisual infinity loop mechanism that encourages playful investigation, experimentation, and self-reflection within the space. Exhibition visitors are invited to step into the piece and explore how their layered present, past, and future movements might interact between the physical and virtual dimensions.

Open workshops are part of the supporting recruitment, training, mediation, and interactive components of the artwork that offer people multiple ways to access, contribute to, and contextualize the exhibition.

OPEN CALL FOR LOCAL PARTICIPANTS

GUIDING INTERESTS
ARCOS Dance, established in 2011 and now based in Austin, Texas, experiments rigorously to discover adventurous new forms of contemporary performance. ARCOS is co-directed by artists, educators, and performers Erica Gionfriddo (they/them) and Eliot Gray Fisher (he/him). For five years, ARCOS has continued investigating the influence of ever-evolving technologies on our cyborgian identities through the Ether Series, which has undergone twenty or more iterations of experimental transmedia performance.

An interest in the democratization of art in consideration of the local context is one of the primary factors leading ARCOS’ interest in continuing the Ether series in Tunis. Since November 2019, ARCOS has closely collaborated with the TASAWAR Collective to craft an iteration unique to MATTER OF TIME. Through Potential Future Pasts, the artist-curator team wishes to explore the possibilities when contemporary art is removed from its pedestal and brought to everyday citizens.

ARTFORM
Interactive performance-installation; movement workshops

MATERIAL
Video projection, Facebook Live video streaming, Music

QUOTES
“Both things are vibrant: regular people and contemporary art. Both of these things should go together.”
-Eliot Gray Fisher in interview conducted by Aisha Tida Abbassi, 13 August 2020

“We have shifted almost exclusively to using the word ‘dance artist.’ ‘Dancer’ is this kind of denigrated term, like an obedient person who’s going to enact the thing that the director or the choreographer defines, rather than having any agency themselves. So when you put ‘artist’ in there, it’s another really wonderful word that implies agency and that they are this fully-realized creative being.”
-Eliot Gray Fisher in interview conducted by Aisha Tida Abbassi, 13 August 2020

“…in the kind of work we represent, the kinds of things we support as a company, what we produce, everything surrounding us…We’re really focused on how every aspect of the company can be doing that work of disrupting the -isms and entrenched power.”
-Erica Gionfriddo in interview conducted by Aisha Tida Abbassi, 13 August 2020

BIO _ Erica Gionfriddo (they/them)
Since 2013 | Lives in Austin.TX.us
2011 | Santa Fe.NM.us | Co-established ARCOS Dance with Curtis Uhlemann
1984 | Born in Hartford.CT.us

BIO _ Eliot Gray Fisher (he/him)
Since 2013 | Lives in Austin.TX.us
2011 | Santa Fe.NM.us | Joined ARCOS Dance
1983 | Born in Boston.MA.us

TEXTS Selection

[section under construction]

VIDEO

ARCOS Work Samples from ARCOS Dance on Vimeo.

PHOTO

[insert gallery]

REFERENCES

^1aLejeune, Phillipe, translated by Katherin Durnin. “Autobiography and New Communication Tools.” in Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, edited by Anna Poletti and Julie L. Rak, 247-258. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.

^1bquote from Lejeune in the original French: “Nous perdons les attaches à long terme, l’enracinement dans le passé, la projection dans l’avenir, qui nous permettraient de nous construire une identité narrative.” Source: http://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/litterature/les-dossiers-transversaux/theories-litteraires/l-autobiogra phie-et-les-nouveaux-outils-de-communication

²Nathan Jurgenson, “The Faux-Vintage Photo: Full Essay (Parts I, II and III). TheSocietyPages.org. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/05/14/the-faux-vintage-photo-full-essay-parts-i-ii-a nd-iii/

CURATOR
Aisha Tida Abbassi